Silicon Updates: 3D Audio to complement Virtual Reality for enhanced audio experience

World's first "talkie" film was released almost 90 years ago in October 1927. The talkie part of the movie immersed the audience into a new experience. From then, the audio experiences has undergone many revolutionary advancements and enhancements through analog audio to digital audio, DTS, Dobly ATMOS etc. All these paradigms in acoustic experiences to the audience are restricted to 2D stereoscope. With Dolby ATOMS, the audience the audience can experience the "surroundedness" of a visual experience.

Here comes the new Binaural 3D, through which the audience can experience the relativity dimension in the audio. When compared to the conventional stereo audio, the Binaural 3D audio is more authentic to our ears and more into the audio. With the 3D audio, the acoustics of a scene can be reproduced spatially to, literally, put the audience into the audio. By inserting the 3D audio, the audience can feel the sounds occurring behind them and all around them, with the help of spatial information integrated into the audio.

Comparison with conventional 2D audio and Binaural 3D:

The difference between the conventional 2D stereo audio and the Binaural 3D audio can be clearly understood with an anology. When you are watching a 3D movie, you feel the depth of the video just instead of the flatness of the video. Here, the depths of different objects is different from one another and are "relative" to each other on the time line of their generation. In the same way, the every sound produced in the 3D environment is relative to each other and the new 3D audio differentiates each of these sounds, providing an unbeatable experience to the audience. 

The BINCI Project:

The firms Eurecat, HEAD acoustics GmbH, 3D Sound Labs, Antenna International and Voodoopop have been working on 3D acoustics from years. These five audio firms has formed an association called The BINCI Consortium (BINaural tools for Creative Industries). The efforts of the BINCI project to capture the 3D sounds been difficult and found very expensive. The 3D audio can be captured by equipping a mannequin equipped with microphones, which act as receptors of the sounds in spatial environment. The BINCI Consortium has been working on the tools to capture the 3D audio efficiently using cost effective methods. 

The BINCI Project objectives

Once the consortium is able to achieve the goals, the 3D audio will be integrated with Virtual Reality, for a complete new experience to the audience both in visuals and acoustics of a scene. As a beta run of this integrated experience, the BINCI project has planned to unveil this technology in a cultural and heritage sites like Fondació Joan Miró (Barcelona, Spain), Opéra Garnier (Paris, France), and Alte Pinakothek BStGS (Munich, Germany). On these ground, the audience will be the witness to a new era of acoustics. Just in five years from now, the 3D audio is expected to reach out throughout the world, just like flat TVs did in the past.